ISP Information:
The intermediary device between a computer and a printer. In the old days, if you had no spooler your computer would wait as the printer slowly printed a document. You would send your print data to a spooler to accept the data and save it temporarily to hard disk or memory while it dealt with the slow printer for you. Nowadays print-server is a more current term for describing this type of device. Most modern operating s
ISP Glossary:
Spool - Bill Burns wrote: Tony P. wrote: If you can find it at your library, get "A history of Engineering and Design in the Bell System: Electronic Technology" They go into the tube based amplifiers used for the early sub-oceanic cables. An excellent book, and a good recommendation, but the first tube repeaters came a hundred years after the beginning of undersea cable communications so I don't know if this should be considered "early".Anyone who is interested in this stuff who gets the chance should visit theold Cable and Wireless College museum at Porthcurno, Cornwall, UK. It isthe devil to get to, being the first cove in on the south side from Land'sEnd. The train ends at Penzance, some miles to the east. I rode out bybicycle, so it isn't all that far. I don't know if there is a bus, but acab fare shouldn't kill you. There is a nice beach as well. The docents afew years ago when I visited were retired C&W people who really knew theirstuff.Porthcurno is where the first successful transatlantic cable landed, andmany current ones still do. They have pieces of some of the cables fromthose of that era up through the more modern tube amplifiers and beyond.The very early cables were a single conductor keyed both ways againstground. The signal was so weak, it was used to deflect a tiny mirrormounted on a torsion wire. A light was shined on the mirror and bouncedback on a wall maybe fifteen feet away. There was a line on the wall, andthe operators watched the deflections. Once a message was received it wasretransmitted on the landline system. As I recall, this thing could domaybe 10-12 words per minute, and was extremely expensive to use.The cable landing at Porthcurno was considered of utmost importance duringWW2, and much of the museum is in the bunkers built there. The Installationis much more heavily fortified than the cabinet bunker in London. Odd thingis that the cables came right up on the beach to a connection point in asmall shack. I guess it could be replaced with little bother if hit.The C&W college is interesting in itself. The company built it to trainuniversity grads for underseas telegraphy, and later telephony, service.Since many of these assignments were extremely isolated, the isolation ofthe college location served to wash out those who couldn't take it beforethey ended up on a rock in some ocean with two supply ships a year.
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